I know I’m biased, but this is the dopest wedding picture ever. That’s me in the back, next to my mom. Michelle is in front of me, smoldering for the camera. Yolanda is on the far right. I don’t know what she’s doing.

I met my wife in a natural hair salon in University City. The shop’s owner noticed me on the street with a friend of mine. She invited us in, because both my friend and I looked like future perfect clients; we both had rough looking locs. The woman who would become my wife was inside, sitting in a seat beside the window.

Something about that image stuck in my head. It was an itch. A distraction. My friend and I talked on the corner. He was going to get a computer worked on. I was trying hard to give a damn. Then she left.

I watched the direction that she was walking, and then I made an educated guess as to where she was going. What followed was a clumsy introduction in a CVS Pharmacy. During the course of the next few minutes, I asked how old she was. And when she told me, I didn’t believe her.

I thought she had tacked on an extra 10 years. I did the math in my head while she bought potato chips. I found out later that I had made a terrible first impression. But not so bad that she didn’t agree to get some coffee with me.

That’s how we began, more than six years ago. After that we dated, then we broke up. She moved to NYC. I drove to NYC to see her. There were arguments. I remember she told me that she didn’t like me. I remember the long drive home from Germantown, after she had kicked me out of her house.

I also remember writing poetry in a little red book. You see, I wanted her. That statements is and is not about sex. I wanted her. I didn’t feel right when there were miles between us. When we didn’t speak, I felt hollow. I was in my 30’s. This felt like High School.

I remember us arguing over the phone while I was at work. I threw that little Nokia against the wall of the Union League hard enough to chip the granite. It shattered. I picked up the sim card, jumped in my car and went to her.

If you have never wanted a woman so bad that you found yourself crying quietly in broad daylight on Penn’s Landing when you found out that she was moving to another city, then I highly recommend it.

I know dudes who pick their women with all of the objectivity that they might invest in buying a low mileage BMW. Face X Body + or – freakiness, over the amount of energy that you must invest in keeping her equals whether or not she is the main chick, side chick or stunt chick.  Build a stable. Put them all together and make up the ideal woman. That’s how you run love life according to the economics of scale. If Walmart got lonely, this is how it would pick a wife.

Or you can fall hard for one woman. A beautifully imperfect woman who makes you work for it. And you can put your heart in her hands while she quietly, and totally unbeknownst to you, does the same. And then you get married in front of friends and loved ones in a small park in Philadelphia, move your blended family down South and try like mad to make it work.

That’s the thing. No matter how you do it, one day you are going to have to figure out how to make it work. Because love and like are two different things. And one day it’s not going to matter if you were friends before you married, or if you got sloppy drunk in Vegas after a one night stand. You are not going to like her. And all you’ll have left is whatever love is to you.

For me it’s driving home along Kelly Drive, late at night, thinking about Michelle. It’s a book of poetry that I used to add to in a little coffee shop on Baltimore Avenue.

One day, those things that you did to get her might be the only things you have in you power to hold on to her. And if she was main chick number two, amongst a stable of six, then good luck after she’s tired of you. Because her desperation might just wear out. Then, when all you know is how to satisfy yourself, you won’t have any idea how to show her that you love her.

I wrote this because I was looking at that red book book of poetry the other day. Now it sits on a drum next to our bed, but before the last entry, it had been years since I had written in it. It was collecting dust on a bookshelf in our den.

It is a roadmap to how we got here. And now that we’re here, I need to fill the pages. Buy another. Fill those too. It’s no good knowing how to keep a woman, if you don’t put in the work.

Besides, I need her no less now than I did back then. Now I’m a husband and father and a whole lot of other stuff, but this thing between us has more humble roots. It goes all the way back to Philadelphia, when all I knew about her was that I wanted her.